Last week, Central Desktop gathered for an afternoon of fun at Lacey Park in San Marino, CA.  Our Orange County and Pasadena offices joined together for catered bbq, cake, and games to celebrate our hard working employees and company growth.



Central Desktop is quickly expanding!

If you want to love where you work, check out our career site:  http://jobs.centraldesktop.com.  

We select smart and energetic team players who are driven to make a difference, every day. We pride ourselves on growing a team of innovative professionals who are passionate and unconventional employees! Think you'd be the perfect addition to the company? Apply today!

Growing your SMB with Effective Project Management Skills

One of the biggest challenges of working in a small business is working simultaneously on a multiple number of projects, with fewer personnel and resources.  There's also the fact that most small businesses lack the infrastructure to apply typical project management methodology, meaning that SMB project managers need to work smart and efficiently to get each project completed.

How do you go about this challenge?  SMTT (SMART Goals, Milestones, Tasks and Tracking) of course!

1. SMART Goals:

Creating goals is crucial for an organization's success. How can you get somewhere without knowing how to get there?  Without SMART goals for your organization, you will be at a huge disadvantage from your competition and you will keep coming up short on your expectations.

A SMART goal is one that is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely.  If you say I want to make $1,000,000 (in a Dr. Evil tone), I say good luck! How are you going to get there? I bet it's not a money tree. For contrast, here is a SMART goal: Increase revenue to $1,000,000 by selling 100 widgets @$10,000 by December 31, 2010.

2. Milestones:

Milestones are also important in goal attainment; they help give a base line overview of what steps are in your goal. In relation to our SMART goal, two milestones might be "Produce 100 Widgets" and "Sell 100 widgets".

Scalability is a critical component to most successful organizations.  In many ways, the same could be said for individual consultants and their respective consulting firms.  However, in order to effectively scale and drive revenue, a consultant needs to possess an excellent foundation in project management principles and techniques.

Exceptional project management skills help a consultant avoid being in a constant state of "catch up" and instead focus on managing an engagement, anticipating risk, resolving issues, and refining his/her ever-expanding library of best practices.  It is these exact best practices that will help a consulting firm win business over a competitor during a competitive RFP process.  While it is not always the case, a firm that is able to convey value, experience, and credibility through repeated success will end up well-positioned in good and not so good economic periods.

Winning business and having high utilization rates as a consultant is fun, but it's only the beginning.  It's important to further understand why your client will be so focused on project management during the engagement. 

Here are what I consider to be the top 5 sponsor concerns during a project:

1) My company is committed to this project because it will help drive revenue, operational efficiency, or solve another critical concern.

    * Depending on the scope of the project, an average or below average implementation could put the viability of our company at risk.

2) My career and credibility at my company WILL BE impacted by the success of this project.

    * It can lead to endless opportunities (promotion, raise in pay) or my firing.

3) I have full time job responsibilities outside of this project.

    * Your abilities to help establish a project plan, coordinate the roll out, anticipate and resolve issues, and manage risk through project completion are invaluable to me.

In today's article we're going to explore a neat trick you can use to customize your Central Desktop workspaces.If you are using Central Desktop and have either a Company or Enterprise Edition, then you're probably familiar with the two different user types: internal or external. Internal users are usually members of your own organization; external might be customers, vendors, subcontractors - folks outside of your organization that you might need to bring in to participate in a workspace.

For Your Eyes "Internal Use Only"

Want to filter certain workspace content by user type? Just use the "Internal Use Only" feature to filter Task Lists, Databases, Milestones and File Folders. "Internal Use Only" allows you to "hide" these things from external users so they don't have access to that content. However, it's limited to these five assets: Task Lists, Databases, Milestones, File Folders and Custom tabs.

Using Custom Tabs

So let's say that we want to hide the Calendar tab from external users. Right now, there is no "Internal Use Only" setting for the Calendar tab, but don't worry! Here's how to do it: 

1. First thing we want to do is open a workspace that has the Calendar enabled and then click on the Calendar tab.
2. Once the calendar has opened, look up in the URL field. What we're going to do is copy everything that appears after the LAST slash... so if your URL reads: http://acme.centraldesktop.com/acmeproject/calendar, you just want to copy the word 'calendar'.

Customer Spotlight: The Contract Centre

Based in Zurich, The Contract Centre specializes in providing "in-house" contract support at a lower cost than typical law firms. The company is able to keep its costs down by being a completely virtual team - eliminating the cost of a downtown office and constant traveling. Because The Contract Centre employs over 25 lawyers, based all over the world, the company needed a way to easily share documents and collaborate with each other around the clock in a seamless manner.

Central Desktop as a Document Management and Team Collaboration Tool

After evaluating a few other collaboration solutions including SharePoint, The Contract Centre selected Central Desktop for its flexibility and ability to accommodate external collaboration. The team quickly began using Central Desktop to share documents and contract drafts both internally and with clients. The Check In/Check Out feature allowed multiple lawyers who were working on the same contract to easily keep track of who had the most recent version.

By using Central Desktop, The Contract Centre was able to stay coordinated and connected at all times, which is typically a challenging task for a virtual company. The company is continuing to grow at a fast pace and we're happy to be there to support them along the way!

To learn more about how The Contract Centre is using Central Desktop, click here.

In the last month we have added more than 20 articles and a couple of new videos to the Central Desktop Help Center.  We also made some changes to the help center search tool and category pages to make it easier to find what you're looking for.

Help Center RSS Feed

Expand your CD knowledge by signing up for our RSS feed or visit the Recent Articles page and read the latest content.

Better Search

I'll be the first to admit that our help search was... well, weak.  Last month we moved to a new search tool and are seeing a vast improvement in the results.  Not finding what you're looking for?  Let us know.

Some users would like the option to toggle the 'File Preview' found in the Files & Discussions area within Central Desktop.  Here's the step by step hack that can be done within the Company Style Template that will create a button to toggle the File Preview on and off.  This will affect all users within the company and only Company Admins can make this change.  (Note:  This has only been tested with the latest versions of these web browsers - Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Safari.  There are known issues with using any Internet Explorer browser prior to IE8).

Example:

File Preview Closed 

File Preview Opened

You can replicate this in 5 easy steps:

1.  Go to Account - > Company Setup -> Look and Feel tab -> Style Templates

2.  Find the following line in your template:

<div class="body-wrapper###IF:INSPACE### inspace###ENDIF:INSPACE###">

Company intranets are great tools for keeping employees in the loop with things going on throughout different departments.  It can also be a great place to view and grab company resources such as contact information, calendar holidays, time off requests, and more. Using Central Desktop's Wiki feature, you can easily create a professional, customized Intranet for your company, without wasting IT resources and time. I'll go over creating an Intranet page from scratch in this post, showing you how easy it is to set up your own.

Setting up your Intranet Wiki

1. Create a new Workspace and name it Intranet
2. Go to Settings > Tab Options and add/remove the tabs you want to use for this Intranet.  For my example, I chose to have the Home, Company Directory, Calendar, and Forum Tabs only.
3. Go to Settings > General Settings > Look and Feel > Workspace Style Templates > Choose a Static Bar template you wish to use (for this example, I chose Static Left Bar) This will give you nice sidebar where you can add links to company resources i.e. a link to the new employee handbook.
4. Go to Settings > General Settings > Configuration Options > Choose Hide Wiki Tree Navigaion (this will hide the wiki tree and make your Intranet page more visually appealing)

Start Customizing

This is the part where you can decide what will go on your Intranet page - its completely up to you.  You can see how I've set up this Intranet in the WYSIWYG editor to add contact information, create links to important documents, add a photo, and a Recent Activity Application Block.  The total amount of time? About 20 Minutes for the intial setup/adding content and another 10 minutes to clean up the layout. Here are some tips on customizing your intranet's design - the amount of detail and content you want on an Intranet page is up to you.  I hope you find this helpful in creating your own company Intranet page.  Have fun!